


Ourselves, Under Pressure

by ElectricKettle (DaLaRi)



Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Character Study, Implied/Referenced Torture, Introspection, M/M, To Be Edited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-02 01:36:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20267887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaLaRi/pseuds/ElectricKettle
Summary: The Center didn't kill Jim Prideaux, but that didn't mean he didn't wish he was dead.Title a reference to Under Pressure by Queen feat. David Bowie





	Ourselves, Under Pressure

the main thing jim prideaux thinks about during his days, weeks, months in what he thinks is Russia (and when the stars move enough for him to pick up the corner of orion he at least knows he’s north of the black sea which is really all he needs to know) is about how impersonal everything is. he sees no one’s face more than a few times, and he gets the feeling that he is being watched like a radio host’s switchboard. it is incredibly impersonal, and when jim prideaux is not busy gasping at relief at the end of a long, long interminable session, he is almost, to a degree, offended. not on any personal level, but the information he has isn’t bad, and the information he’s hidden so deep he doesn’t know what it is anymore is even better. but they’re keeping him to ask about tobe esterhase’s  _ socks _ . he works in brixton, for chrissakes, how is he supposed to know. he feels like a particularly ill-maintained office plant, or paperweight, except his arm goes numb up to the elbow now for days on end and when they take him off the sound machine he can sometimes feel his brain oozing out onto the floor. sometimes he goes with it, contemplates the brown ceiling and tries not to think about how the guards can read the words spelled out in the puddle of his brain, can see the memories he retreats into, wears threadbare, rends.

he has brick dust worked into the pads of his fingers now from running them over the walls near his bed, trying to have one measure of control of what he sees, hears, feels. he doesn’t know if he sleeps anymore, exhaustion is heavy, bleary-eyed and sharp like nausea, but he wonders if he is wearing his fingerprints smooth. wonders if, when the circus collects his body, if they ever do, if it’ll cause a snag in the identification process. he ruthlessly squashes the idea that they’re going to bring bill in to identify him, the idea that he might not be recognizable to bill by the time he returns.  _ even to bill, even to bill _ , his brain chants, and he thinks he sees the guards reading the thoughts as they float across the surface of his brain-puddle.  _ even to bill, he can be made unrecognizable. _ he doesn’t like to think about what it would take, about how bill has worked his way into his lungs like the start of pneumonia, into the lines of his face, under his fingernails, in the pads of his fingers now being worn either smooth or raw by the incessant motion of his hands over the bricks.

for some reason, he expected them to give him gloves when they figured out what he was doing his hands. when they handcuff him, he has to admit that this is imminently more practical. he thinks less about the circus as a place now, and thinks more of it as its surroundings (tries not to think about how the memories of the interior dull grey space with its bad heating are being wrenched from him one by one like bloody teeth for him to spit on the ground near his captors’ feet, tries not to think of the man with George smiley’s lighter, not to think of George or ann smiley because bill is with him sometimes, when he drifts between the rough touches of the standing medics who have decided it is not his right to die) and instead thinks of the trees down the street who always seemed out of sync with the weather, dropping leaves and bits of grime onto his or bill’s cars whenever they parked there, and about the overpriced café near the train station where he and bill would have their not-so-clandestine meetings, bill sharp and overeager and his own balance of smug, reserved, and aching. he can’t taste anything but the staleness of his own mouth, the taste of the brick dust and maybe sometimes night air, so he tries not to remember anything, not to remember bill’s hair like coarse fiber, like silk between his fingertips,  _ god _ he hopes he’s not in the chamber right now because if tobe esterhase’s socks are of interest, what is  _ this _ to them, he’s forgotten something, he’s forgotten something, but he  _ mustn’t  _ remember, oh, how he misses even brixton, his chair that he’d draped a scarf across the back and never gotten around to putting away, the loud heating that wasn’t much better than the circus central but at least made a better show of doing nothing. he misses turning doorknobs, abruptly, and wants to throw his head back and laugh, but his face is so knotted up that it’s probably a snarl,  _ oh, there are a thousand ways to kill a man, would bill even recognize him now _

he gets snatches of sleep, watches bill pull white sheets from off his face from a hundred places, stretched out across bill’s dining table, laid across bill’s desk at the circus, left at the doorstep of ann smiley’s house for bill to find, bill sometimes as jim had first known him, tall and gangly and too often cruel in his expressions of affection, bill older, his smile woven together like fabric (knowing which strands to pull to get it to unravel into something genuine was an art, and with the way he can’t feel his limbs most of the time now he wonders if he’ll still have a knack for it in the end, and then curses himself for thinking he’ll go home in the end). every time but a few horrible ones, bill doesn’t know who jim is when he looks under the shiit (jim never catches a glimpse of his own face), but the times bill recognizes jim, he looks up from to body to where jim is standing and the dream always shifts, leaving jim feeling like he’s been ripped away.

he can’t point to the day, to the moment, where the last of his memories wrench loose, but it’s like being disemboweled in that, once he starts bleeding, he can’t stop, and Control’s name is on his lips and every fact he spills is like ink into bill haydon’s paper grave, and his eyes are welling up with precious salt and water he can’t afford to waste but

they know. they know everything already. it feels somehow less like dying and more like awakening from a dream to find out you’re already dead. there’s nothing to do with him, and suddenly, all his ruminations about office plants and the like seem silly because, well it never was about him anyways. he had no importance in the grand scheme of things, and suddenly he wonders if bill haydon  _ could _ identify him at all, identify him, james prideaux, the irrelevant man. nothing else matters from then on out, and the memories stop, even if the hemorrhaging of words don’t. he bites through his own tongue in an attempt to sabotage his ability to speak, dislocates his jaw against the bedframe when they handcuff him for the night, but that just draws things out, and the frail body he’s been restrained to (the frail, numb body) hemorrhages words in exchange for sustenance, and by the time he’s done and the circus with its warm hands and blankets comes for him, he, the irrelevant man, is done. he’s still talking, he thinks, when they sedate him, asking for bill, if he’s there if they’ve seen him

he wakes up in a hospital, and if the tingling painful numbness of nerve damage hadn’t been radiating across his shoulders, he’d have been pulling the attachments from him to go, as if to pay spectator to one of his dreams. he wonders briefly if he’s dead; things are colorful and not too loud here and if he wanted he could likely sleep. it seems briefly like heaven, but the wheeling of a cart sets off his full-body need to get away, which makes him realize he’s strapped to the bed, he decides it’s not heaven, unless heaven has changed since he was away.

it takes too long for his thoughts to regain a semblance of order. he dreams, and sleeps badly, and sleeps the deep sleep of the drugged, and fights the constant fear of still being speaking. when he wakes up and his lips are numb, he panics and barely remembers to smash the ask for assistance button, to have one of the twelve nurses in the ward (and the consistency of the nurses’ faces is part of what made him think it might be heaven, but he briefly considered it all being a front for more center interrogation before remembering he was irrelevant and did not matter and resigning himself to more impartial care) hurry in and watch him grapple with his silence and his panic while he tries to fight down every part of him that’s screaming that he never escaped, that he’s either lying under a sheet on the doorstep of Bywater street or that he’s still in the cell with its too-sharp bricks, and after a minute the nurse sedates him, and when he wakes again his lips are painful but not numb and for a second he is drifting like he used to, before he smashes into reality again.

  
it’s been a while, he knows, because Emily’s hair (Wednesdays, mornings, 6th most likely to be a center spy) has grown from above her shoulders to below her shoulders, and neither bill nor anyone from the circus have come to see him yet. not even George smiley’s conscience has prompted a visit, nor his role as control’s conscience either, and jim is bemused for one whole second before he remembers, bitterly, that he’s not relevant to any current circus business unless bill became a part of something while he was gone (his brain supplies helpfully that, out of past and present acquaintances, bill is number 3 on the list of most likely to be a center spy, after…. he can’t remember, but he knows that he is on there at number two, because, he thinks, he would rather not go into the sound room again. bill doesn’t visit him, and jim’s memories of him are worn through and filled up with so much brick dust he doesn’t know if  _ he’d _ be able to identify bill haydon if someone slipped his corpse under the door between nurse shifts.


End file.
